Telerik Paves Path to Modern Mobile Applications

With more people relying primarily on a mobile computing device to access the Web, real estate is at a premium. This issue has increased the call for more data-driven applications where everything a user needs to see is on a single Web page.

Known as a Single Page Application (SPA) framework, building these applications requires developers to be cognizant of writing code in a much more modular fashion. According to Todd Anglin, executive vice president of cross-platform tools and services at Telerik, a major driver of this trend is the increasing practicality of embedding applications inside a browser, which fundamentally transforms how applications are being used and deployed.

To help developers make that transition, Telerik this week released the latest version of Kendo UI, a framework for building mobile computing applications. According to Todd Anglin, the goal of Kendo UI is to allow developers to build a mobile application using modern development architectures in as little as a couple of weeks.

In addition to supporting frameworks such as SPA and RequireJS/AMD (RJS), Kendo UI now includes server wrappers for PHP and Java in addition to existing support for Microsoft.NET. Instead of requiring organizations to rewrite entire applications in JavaScript and HTML5, the server wrappers allow existing PHP, Java and Microsoft.NET applications to be integrated with mobile computing devices running JavaScript and HTML5. The latest version of Kendo UI also adds support for Windows Phone 8 devices.

The increasing dominance of JavaScript, coupled with the rise of more modular approaches to building applications, is rapidly changing the way applications are built, deployed and managed. In addition to creating a need to be continuously testing applications, greater reliance of application programming interfaces means giving developers more direct insight into how people are using their applications.

Of course, people are also expecting developers to use that feedback loop to regularly improve their applications. That’s never going to happen, however, if developers are still relying on tools that were designed to develop applications for a previous era of computing.